


eyes I dare not meet in dreams

by tillwehavefaces



Series: The Hyacinth Boy [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Age Difference, Dom/sub Undertones, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Internal Monologue, M/M, Not Beta Read, Obsession, Older Man/Younger Man, Power Dynamics, Stream of Consciousness, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 19:13:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17392079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tillwehavefaces/pseuds/tillwehavefaces
Summary: One winter evening a boy with hair like beaten sunlight and eyes like glaciers came to my door.





	eyes I dare not meet in dreams

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working through Ursula K. Le Guin's craft book and this came out of one of the exercises, which was to focus solely on the language, so it's very stream-of-consciousnessy. I honestly don't know if it works, but the premise of the piece (schoolboy/schoolmaster, with the boy being the dominant one in the relationship) is one I've had in my head for a while. I plan, eventually, to write more bits and pieces around these characters.
> 
> I've tagged it as underage since the relationship that this fic focuses on is between an adult and a minor, even though there's nothing explicit; it's all only hinted at.

This fixation will be the undoing of me. It is already undoing me, unspooling me like the entrails of a cat under a sadist’s knife. I am coming unmoored, untethered, from all the certainties that formed the bedrock of my existence, that chained me to a semblance of normality.

Once, dreams were my escape from reality.

There is now no escape in dreams. Only there are his limbs smoothly passing over one another, and the hand on the whip is the hand caressing and the mouth on the wound is the mouth devouring.

There is no more solace in dreams. Only there are his eyes like new-born stars, and a voice like God when He banished Satan from heaven.

_I don’t really like boys._

I said that to the headmaster with a jocular disdain that was meant to leave no doubt in either of our minds. I wasn’t a schoolteacher—best school in the cosmos or no, I accepted this role as a sufferance (I accepted it because it paid better than Manchester, and money matters, even if posh types are supposed to pretend it doesn’t). When I left high school, I had said, that was _it._ I never intended to set foot in a school again, not even at gunpoint. My exact words.

You see. Not only not a pædophile, a downright _pædophobe_. Of course, I didn’t tell _why_ I _don’t_ , and have _never_ , liked boys.

It’s been hell, but it’s also been heaven, and that’s the worst hell of all. Mostly that’s been him.

He’s not Pop, or even Select, or even a Captain. Instead he’s everything a prefect ought to be, but isn’t interested. He doesn’t give the impression of being overly interested in anything—refreshing; and therefore dangerous, when he suddenly exhibits a very strong interest in... what exactly I can’t ( _won’t_ ) say.

Not in Pop, not Select, not a Captain —that would have been easy. Mortals are permitted to admire the gods, since there’s no hope of anything coming of it: the very disparity implies impossibility.

One doesn’t even feel they’re real, ones like that; they float through the halls and then out into the world, and if their feet ever touch the ground our eyes are too enamoured of their radiance to notice. Even back home there were types you felt sacrilegious just looking at. I lowered my eyes, or turned away when they came toward me down the street—never with jealousy in my heart; God knows I’ve never given place to resentment. I don’t begrudge anybody else for being what they are; I only wish I didn’t have to share the earth with them, when it’s plain to all concerned I’m not worthy to lick the dust at their feet. But they’re pretty well content to leave me alone; I make myself as small and invisible as I can, and when I _do_ have to talk to them I’m _please God please God please_ as _normal_ as possible. So I manage all right. Can’t stop the dreams, of course, or the daydreams, but one hopes that for things outside one’s control one should be absolved of guilt.

And if, every so often, one descends from Olympus to play games with the mortals, one simply says (simply, with a lightening of the head and darkening of the cheeks and catching of the breath) that they belong up there, not down here, and besides, this mortal isn’t in the mood to be toyed with, is that clear you posh poncy prick?

I would go home feeling rather flushed with self-righteousness, and only marginally lonelier than I always feel anyway when walking the dimming streets at the end of day. Then I turn out the lights, climb into bed, touch myself, thinking of how it would have been if we lived in a world with real gods, not just white boys with sharp jawlines and sparkly eyes and floppy hair and designer jackets, and if instead of looking miffed and maybe even slightly hurt (because some of them are actually fairly nice chaps; I’m not sure whether that makes it worse or better), they’re angry, a god’s fury at my hubris, and they throw me down and ravish me right there, impregnating me with their divine seed, or, if they were one of the nice ones, they whisk me away to Olympus to bear their cup for eternity.

My friend who was a boy—who for a while I called my boy friend, because sheltered sons of Evangelical pastors don’t know what homosexuality is, and he never told me, just laughed and then smiled in a weird way (he was a bit older than me)—was a genuine strawberry blond (his sister merely a redhead), and had rich and pious parents, and was popular and good at sport, and had grooves under his cheekbones like mountain valleys. Sometimes he would look at me, and he too would say things, he would ask me why I didn’t have a girlfriend (every year he’d ask me that) and ever year I’d give some vague answer about girls not really going for nerds (rather than the obvious riposted question of why the _hell_ would any girl be interested in _me?)_

He was not infrequently cruel. He had a lot of material —I was weird, a loner, pizza-faced and had truly godawful manners (especially when I first started going round. I soon learned. Then instead I felt uncomfortable at home). But sometimes I allow myself to wonder, briefly, if his cruelty mightn’t have been angling at something. There are shades and inflections that are perceptible only in hindsight...

When I moved away to uni, and left that small, golden town behind, I stopped answering his phone calls, even though his sweet, quirky old mum rang my mum to ask why I wasn’t answering them.

With this boy there’s no mystery, no ambiguity; he hasn’t even left me that. Maybe— _I hope—_ it’s all in my sick head.

You want an example.

Well, it all started rather trivially, I suppose, even innocuously. I’m no authoritarian—which means I’m able to laugh at myself, the one thing authoritarians can never do—and I like to maintain an informal atmosphere in the classroom, though founded (theoretically) on mutual respect.

I’m used to comments about my height and rotundity—both signature aspects of my ‘physique’ (though it cracks me up to call it that), but ones I had long reconciled myself too and was, I told myself, comfortable with. Yes, I’m a short, pudgy bastard. Yes, my arse sticks out like a girl’s. It doesn’t—it bothers me only on the deep, insoluble level at which all of it bothers me, and so I don’t let it. There’s laughs, and muttered jokes, whenever I have to bend over to pick up a pen or fix the bloody cords under the computer desk. Water off a duck’s back ( _wounds to the heart)._

When it’s him though, it’s different. I feel—I wish I could say it was just my wishful thinking, but something has happened that has pretty much cleared everything up horribly, but _that_ I’m not getting into—but I feel that when he says what he says he means it, and more. I know it’s ridiculous. He’s a young, fit, attractive, schoolboy. I’m an old, comparatively, unfit, unattractive schoolteacher. I’m not suggesting it’s _that._ But—you ever read the Stephen King novella _Apt Pupil?_ Some boys like to exert power, dominance over older men, like to watch them twist, like puppets, on their strings.

Am I saying _he’s_ like that? I don’t know. Certainly he doesn’t exhibit any of the classic signs of the adolescent psychopath—torturing puppies, etc. But one wonders, you know. It’s the little things. I’m not as oblivious as people think I am.

But I don’t know. On the one hand it’s silly for a grown man to be afraid of a teenage boy; on the other hand I’ve been afraid of teenage boys since I was one (technically, at least). Nothing specific, really; nothing you could name or nail down, just—all that made them what they were, made so utterly different from myself, so utterly, _utterly_ unattainable.

Unattainable—there’s a word. There, as my English teacher would say, is the rub. Unattainable is a safe word; it makes everything safe by definition. I, of course, didn’t have to worry about being unattainable—who in their right minds, who in a million years, would want to attain _me?_

But, aye, there’s the rub. You see, I don’t know if he’s _in_ his right mind.

He’s normal—he’s too normal, given what I’ve picked up of his background (parents packed him off to boarding school at _five,_ while they embarked on a world tour which has continued ever since. He spends the holidays at an elderly great-aunt’s. He floats between his friends’ families on the Fourth of June. It’s just that über-normality which makes him so unnerving. He’s liked by all—but I get the funny feeling he doesn’t particularly like anyone else, or rather, he wouldn’t bat an eyelid or shed a tear if the school and everyone in it were suddenly annihilated in nuclear fire. In fact, I think he’d rather enjoy it.

But he says he likes me. I mean, he’s _said_ it. And it was of course ironic, but at the same time… I didn’t know what to do with it. I made some joke about his shocking taste in company. He didn’t smile, not that time.

I suppose I’m just one of those people who’s fundamentally suspicious of anyone who claims to like them—how could I believe it, when I don’t even like myself for Christ’s sake? And, as you’ve no doubt discerned, with very very very fucking good reason.

Oh God. I _do_ hate myself. I hate myself for what I am, and for _how_ I am. _I do not wish to wish these things,_ yet I wish them nonetheless. But never have I had either inclination, or opportunity, to make it more than wishing. To want, but never to have; to desire, but never to act. Until now. When I suddenly found myself—I can’t believe being _desired_ —but I’m afraid undeniably being acted _upon._ Yet, here we go. I’m framing myself as helpless, just because I’m not proactive; as a victim, even though a pathic is still a sinner. But, like I said, I don’t know if I can stand to get into that.

I was standing across the road from Tap—I normally never linger when the boys are about town, but I’d had a call from Emily (and God did I fucking need it after a month, it was by then, in that place). So there I was, and out he came, and I _know, I know, I bloody know_ , he saw me, because clear as day, cool as a cucumber, ringing across the narrow street was his voice (crisp, confident tones with a baritone timbre—his voice is deep, for his age; he sings in the choir).

‘Speaking of,’ he said, breaking into the flow of their conversation as naturally as a king interrupting his courtiers, ‘you know how whenever Williams bends over, he’s got his prat hanging out like a great fucking hippo? One of these days I ought to just pull my cock out and walk up and fuck him, you know? I think the old poofter’d rather enjoy that. And it’d make a bit of a change from sitting there listening to his tosh about Maoism and misogyny and all that.’

‘Whoar, pervert!’ one laugh-splutters, and the others laugh too, in the abrupt, too-loud way that means they’re actually a bit shocked. Which is no mean feat. Teenage boys—particularly teenage boys at boarding schools, with no access to female company—say things so vile it can make you physically ill just to hear them. I’ve heard them, from my cousin back home (who went to boarding school), and my once-best-friend. _If her age is on the clock, she's ready to take cock. Old enough to count, old enough to mount._

I don’t think I every really got over that one: young, fairly innocent, pastor’s son standing in line for the movies just ahead of his older cousin and friend. I _liked_ girls, you see—not in _that_ sense; never in that sense. But before I was hit by puberty all my friends were girls, and we played with barbies together. We loved to undress them and inspect their non-anatomy (there was one bizarre doll, which had a magnetised pregnant stomach and a little infant that went inside, that had our complete fascination. Maybe that’s the root of my gross little thing of wanting to have another man’s baby and all.)

But anyway, teenage boys say nasty shit—and less than half of them mean more than half of what they say, thank God. Male Fantasy can, when tugged out someone’s ear and put under a microscope, be rather unsightly, but fortunately it is not reality (a nuance feminists don’t seem able, or willing, to grasp).

 _But._ They don’t say these things about Beaks; they don’t dare, not in their hearing. I stood stock still, while Emily continued with the latest academic gossip, not realising anything was amiss. He looked at me, from across the street. Before I could look away his eyes, that awful, glittering blue that pierces you like a sword and leaves a burning hole in your heart, met mine. He _winked._

After Emily said TTFN (one of our bits of private irony _),_ I walked home in a daze. I couldn’t really believe it had happened.

So, this boy. Would it make a difference if I described him to you? I wonder, would you feel sorry for me then?

I’ve talked of young gods. Take a Ganymede, a Hyacinth, a Narcissus; take their beauty, file away all the soft edges and hone it to a terrible sharpness. Take a Helios, and turn his heat to ice: bright, bitter ice that burns as it freezes. Take an Apollo, or a Dionysus or an Eros and remember everything that made them so perilous to mortals—the madness, the all-consuming desire, the obsession, the inimicality of their radiance to us who walk on earth. Remember, their lovers were lucky if they were turned into trees by the end.

But really, what am I saying. This alleged poet, and he can talk only in roundabouts and abstractions.

Well. It’s hard for me to be poetic about something that’s lodged in my heart like a jagged-edged diamond, shredding the red meat and cartilage with each pulse. The best I can give you is an inventory.

Hair—straight and longish, curled at the tips; flaxen in colour— white gold under the sun, dark caramel when wet. Never a single strand out of place. Eyes—shining sterling silver, or cold blue steel, when he’s angry. Lips—pink and pillowy. Complexion—rose and alabaster, spotless. Teeth—straight, even, perfect. You can tell just from the architecture of his bones that his ancestors came over with William the Conqueror. His height and build is tall and lean enough to be graceful, without the gangling awkwardness common to his age. Everything compact and in proportion. He moves like a dance set to music too sharp or soft or strange for human ears to hear. Not a single motion is mistimed, or misplaced. He moves the way one imagines humans would move if we had evolved as predators.

On the field he’s just as graceful, and even more ruthless; swift and precise, like a panther, or a ballet dancer trained in close-quarters assassination. I’ve seen him time and again go up against big louts twice his size, and every time it’s the other boy who ends up reeling back, usually with a bloody nose or broken rib and wearing an expression of bewilderment. He doesn’t beat them, he breaks them. It’s the same in debates, only those are worse because it’s their personality he annihilates, without at any point stepping over the line of what’s allowed.

Academically, what can I say? His essays are perfect—perfectly argued and perfectly phrased, yet they disturb you, because one feels he could write an essay on why Hitler did nothing wrong, or why Hitler didn’t go far enough, and carry it off with the same flair and flawless logic. Maybe this perfection is why none of the masters really know what to do with him.

In manner, he is magnetic, when he cares to be. Effortlessly charming, supremely confident; I’ve seen him melt the most vinegary old Beaks like butter with a few words and well-placed smiles. He could easily have been the most popular boy in school, if he’d wanted. But he prefers to stand a little back from the limelight, and tug at people from behind, like flesh-puppets on silver strings.

So, you see, you might also have fallen.

That isn’t the all or the end of it though. Not nearly.

He’s inhumanly good-looking, but so is almost every boy here. There are other ways in which he is unlike any person I have known.

I teach twentieth century history—that means the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Rape of Nanking, the Killing Fields: the whole grisly lot. And when I’m teaching genocide, when I’m teaching the pits of corpses, and the cannibal canteens, and the special prisons just for rape, there are two types I pay especial attention to.

The first is the delicate, sensitive-souled ones. The boys who would rather be excused. These boys, I believe, have to be hardened, steeled to face the evil that resides, I remind them, not in some alien externalised foe, but in every human heart. After all, they won’t stay children forever. I am a student of Jung. Sooner or later, each of us must confront his Shadow, lest one day our Shadow rise up and overpower us, and walk about in our skin.

But then there are the boys one wishes _would_ skip those lessons. The ones who, well, without mincing words, get off on it. They _want_ to see the women with legs akimbo, vaginas torn into gory, flapping ruins by Japanese pricks and Japanese bayonets. They want to see the mounds of bloody gold teeth, and the babies with needles in their eyes to make them Aryan blue.

_Men without chests..._

There aren’t many like that, thank God. And those there are I would hope grow out of it, for all our sakes. But him—always so cool, so composed, but he can’t keep it out of his eyes. See, I thought he was one of them. But then I realised why I was feeling fear, rather than revulsion.

It wasn’t the pain that was doing it for him; it was the power.

You may think I’m a paranoid, delusional old fool; that I’m just trying to curry sympathy. But I know what my eyes have seen. I’m not as oblivious as people think.

People who aren’t sociopaths don’t show that many teeth when they smile.

And I was truly afraid, for he was young, intelligent and charming, destined to be a City banker, or a Managing Director or a Minister, or worse yet a husband and a father (for no tyranny is as absolute as the tyranny of a parent over his child) and once he got _that_ sort of power over other human beings, what, I wondered, would he do with it.

As it turned out, I needn’t have wondered. But I don’t want to go there.

So, perhaps I have given you a sense of just what it was that haunted me; that hunted me, though I didn’t know it.

I swear it is God’s truth that when I look in that boy’s eyes, or hear the smirking inflection of his voice, I see the spinning of scarlet threads, _revolving me in webs of finest fire_. It’s like those sapphiric orbs are peeling off all the layers, pulling away all the masks that allow one to travel unmolested through the masquerade we call life.

 _I am become death, the destroyer of worlds._ He could destroy me, I knew, destroy me any way he pleased. It wouldn’t matter, in the end, _how_ he destroyed me. I was never going to survive this. I knew that from the moment he walked into the classroom, and I saw a flicker of surprise in his face, for the first and only time. Surprise, and then a small, slow smile of satisfaction. Everything from that point on was just delaying the inevitable.

I feel at once sick with fear and heady with excitement. You see, nobody has ever looked at me like that. Normally they don’t look at me at all, and I work very hard to keep it that way. He shouldn’t even be aware of my existence, not my real existence, not what’s under the black waistcoat. _That’s_ private. And I’ve always been scrupulous about not mixing private and professional.

I’m a Beak and he’s a boy—our _relationship_ is supposed to be alpha’d and omega’d in ‘Morning sir, sorry I’m late.’

‘Tardy—three hundred lines of _Paradise Lost.’_

‘Yes sir, won’t happen again, sir.’

I’m a thirty-year-old man. I’m not even supposed to be a real person to him.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. The old degenerate sees the admiration shining in the eyes of the child, and reads an invitation. I swear to God I wasn’t looking—for _anything._ Do you think I would have made it this far if I’d let myself go looking for what could never be there, or even what might be there, but _could_ never be there?

D’you see?

I should kill myself. Maybe I will kill myself. But I wanted to see the year out—it wouldn’t be fair on the boys to leave when we’ve only got up to Stalingrad.

In the old days they’d just send you away quietly. Back then they were all doing it, masters to boys and boys to each other, though never so much here as at other places, I believe. It was perfectly monstrous and wicked beyond words—apparently it wasn’t enough to institutionalise emotional, psychological, and physical abuse; sexual abuse just had to get tossed in there as well. Nowadays, of course, it’s the police, and prison. As it should be. Personally, I’d sooner die, though not because I fear justice. I fear shame. I fear humiliation. All my life I’ve never feared anything more (just as I’ve never desired anything more—though that’s humiliation of another kind; private, not public).

This boy, I think, would very much like to give it to me, would like to feed me shame through my teeth, and force it down my throat, till I was sick from it.  Maybe that’s really what’s got me spooked.  You spend your whole life repressing it all, then all of a sudden someone comes along who’s going to give it to you—everything you’ve ever wanted, whether you like it or not, whether it hurts a little or a lot, whether there’s anything left of you by the time they’re finished.

So, what then is to be done. Well, the kettle’s boiled over. I’ve burnt the cream puffs—those were for tutorial tomorrow. The boys like sweet things, and I like feeding them—and there isn’t anything in it at all, d’you hear? Well, except when he’s there.

Once he said, bold and blasé as anything, ‘I like having you cook for me, sir. We ought to see you in an apron one of these days.’ They all laughed. I laughed too, of course. I try to be like that with the boys—other masters would never let them get away with it. But I like to have an easy, egalitarian thing going. I’m a Kiwi, for God’s sake; we don’t go in for all that formal rubbish. And perhaps that was the beginning of my undoing. Perhaps, after all, all that formal rubbish was for a reason, kept certain things where they belonged.

Anyhow. I laughed when he said it to me. Inside I was trembling. Dropped my cup on the floor—made such a mess, and his smile got worse. Kept it up through the whole session, and every time he answered a question, even if it was someone else he was answering, he was looking straight at me, and his eyes were saying.... What were they saying? I don’t know. I’ve no right to know. I’ve no right to say (but if I had a right I’d say they were telling me ever so politely how much he had enjoyed having me on his knees in front of him, and that he knew how much I enjoyed it, too).

But I’ve been coping. There’s gardening, and this week’s recipe, and chocolate eclair ice-cream, and Dad’s Army, and walks in the wood and the anti-depressants, and Christmases back home in the small golden town that hasn’t changed since my parents were kids there. There’s papers and conferences—I’m good with speeches, weirdly enough; I always get laughs, and by now I’m at least eighty percent sure they’re laughing at my jokes, not at me. I’ve had two poetry collections published (pseudonymously, of course), I’ve got an essay anthology coming out in six months, and I’ve just started on my big historical novel, my magnum opus (though I feel unspeakably pretentious calling anything of mine an _opus_ ). I read Rumi, Bashō, Issa, Madame Guyon, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Pound, Evola, Devi. All the time I read Eliot, though God knows we do little good too each other. Poetry isn’t an art to me; it’s an addiction. But still. There’s church on Sundays, with a lovely lady vicar and on a good day about three other old dears, each one half a saint. I’m saving up for my little cottage in Shropshire, the one that will have half-timbered walls and a thatched roof and a rose garden with a big oak tree at the back. And Emily. We’re friends: she’s as weird and geeky and off-kilter as me—in another life, or another era, I would have married her, I think. I bitch and moan (natural pessimism), but I know that I’m lucky to have so much in my life that is good, and she’s the best of it all.

So, I’ve been just about coping, you see. My whole life I’ve been just about coping.

I don’t know for how much longer though. He’s been pushing, and I’ve been sliding down the slippery slope. I’m frightened of what’s at the bottom. And, I have to admit, a little frightened to bottom. I’ve had rectal examinations, and they ranked fairly highly among the most unpleasant experiences of my life, and I know he’ll be as gentle as ripping off a plaster, as shaving with sandpaper, as cracking a walnut with an pickaxe. On the one hand I don’t know how I’ll stand it; on the other hand I know he doesn’t care, and I like it that way, and _he knows_ I like it that way, and so it’s just inevitable, it’s _going to happen_ , even if I have to wear sanitary pads for weeks afterwards. (He’s a big boy, you see—I swear I never stare, but the trousers are so tight, and I don’t think he wears underwear.)

And if it happens once it’ll happen again, and again, and again, and dear God, dear Jesus, what will I become? What will become of me, here and in the hereafter? I don’t want to go to hell, or to Dartmoor (in British prisons they don’t shank you, they boil sugar in water and melt your face off, especially if you go in as a kiddie-fiddler).

I had dreams of a life—but his voice shattered those dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. I looked for a city, but then my eyes met his, and to all the kingdoms of this world and the next I was blinded.

Love. Lust. Obsession. Infatuation. None of those words even begin to cover it. None of them meet the need of the word that must compass, contain, categorise this madness. I don’t know if any word can.

_Inevitable._

That was the word he used, when he finally tired of toying with me, and came out with his ultimatum.

‘Inevitable’, I replied, very carefully, as if I could through sheer willpower keep the million shattered pieces of myself from sliding into oblivion. ‘That’s not very fair, is it?’

He cocked his head slightly, looking eager and amused, and every bit his age.

‘I suppose not’, he said. ‘Do you think I should feel sorry for you?’

Then he smiled. I felt the breath of a cold eternity in that smile.

And this is the crux. This is the rub.

I suppose, in the end, it was my pity that was my undoing. I’m a cold fish, generally speaking. Blame it on a bipolar mother, if you like.

But he was so _damaged._ I could see it, even if no one else could. Hollowed out by neglect and loneliness, by the insane pressures put on boys of that class, especially in this place. By the constant need to play perfection. By the absence of anyone in his life who knew him for who he really was, who wasn’t ultimately a rival or a plaything.

In my naivety, in my vanity, I thought I was doing a kind, compassionate thing. I thought I was being a good Christian, when I told him to come by if he ever needed to talk. I’ve always wanted someone you know—someone to feed up and to coddle and cuddle and just to love. But love isn’t what he wanted from me.

You see, one winter evening, a boy with hair like beaten sunlight, and eyes like glaciers, came to my door. And I suppose from there it really was inevitable.


End file.
